[B-Greek] Optatives?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Jul 2 07:06:14 EDT 2004
At 5:28 PM +1000 7/2/04, <newsgroupstuff at swiftdsl.com.au> wrote:
>I only have a basic Greek text (Wenham), which doesn't say much about
>optatives. Can someone explain the basic difference between optative and
>subjunctive moods?
BASIC difference? This really depends upon which era of Greek linguistic
development one is speaking of. In CLASSICAL ATTIC (and in the revived
literary language of the late first, and later centuries of the Christian
era), the optative has two or three fundamental functions: to express
wishes, to indicate possibilities and contingencies more remote than those
indicated by subjunctives (particularly in conditional or implicitly
conditional constructions), and to mark the verb in a subordinate clause
dependent upon a primary clause whose verb is in a past tense. In the
non-literary Koine it is more obsolete than obsolescent; in the GNT there
are 68 instances all told, and of these, by far the greatest number are
found in Luke's gospel and Acts--and in Paul. But the Pauline usages (30x)
are limited to wishes and to the rather idiomatic expression MH GENOITO
(14x) which conveys something of the force of the American English idiom,
"No way!" In general, I think I perusal of those 68 instances in the GNT
will reveal that the great majority of them are expressions of wishes ("May
x happen/not happen!").
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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